“It’s key to note that the DigiTimes has a hit-or-miss track record for nailing predictions….”“Digitimes has a spotty track record with regard to Apple rumors…”“Given the lack of hard evidence and DigiTimes’s less-than-stellar record for rumors of this kind…”

They weren’t the first reporters to spread one of Digitimes’s Apple rumors while expressing caution about the odds that it amounted to anything. For years, Digitimes has been a high-profile rumormonger when it comes to upcoming Apple products, usually crediting its gossip to the Asian component makers who supply Apple with bits and pieces of technology. (The publication says, for instance, that “sources from the upstream supply chain” told it about the $799 Air.) Its stories get covered widely — sometimes by writers who pause to express a certain degree of doubt, and sometimes by ones who don’t.

But the thing is, Digitimes isn’t just wrong some of the time. When it comes to the big Apple stories, it’s wrong most of the time. Sometimes wildly so. It’s reported that its sources had said that Apple was going to release MacBooks with AMD processors, iMacs with touch screens, iPhones with built-in projectors and iPads with OLED displays. Those products, and others mentioned in Digitimes articles, never showed up.

A Digitimes defender might argue that the publication always says that the Apple rumors it reports are merely what it’s heard from various sources. Which is true. But at least some of its sources appear to be so lousy that suppressing their scuttlebutt would make more sense than publicizing it — and partway through its stories, it sometimes stops hedging and starts stating the rumor as fact.

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The continued willingness of other tech journalists to take its Apple reporting even semi-seriously is a potent example of the Jeane Dixon effect at work. Dixon (1904-1997), the celebrated American astrologer/psychic, told Parade magazine in 1956 that the president elected in 1960 would be a Democrat, and that he’d die in office. That was enough to let her claim that she’d predicted John F. Kennedy‘s assassination, a triumph that she spent decades milking. Even though she later predicted that Nixon would win the 1960 election. And that World War III would break out in 1958. And that cancer would be cured in 1967.

Like Dixon, Digitimes still has an audience. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the prognostications it publishes come true or not, and no amount of being wrong is enough to ruin its reputation.

That’s not to say that Digitimes never gets anything right — sometimes it breaks news that actually turns out to be news. As I thought about the $799 MacBook Air rumor and the chances it might pan out, I decided to revisit old Digitimes stories to get a better sense of its batting average. I ended up fact-checking 25 of them.

The rumor: Apple will “soon” take on Microsoft‘s wi-fi-enabled Zune MP3 player by releasing an iPod with built-in wireless capabilities — and is already training Asian salespeople how to demonstrate them.

The source: “market sources”

The upshot: Apple doesn’t introduce anything which is called an iPod and has wi-fi until more than a year later, when it launches the iPod Touch. Even today, more conventional iPods, such as the Nano and Classic, don’t have wi-fi.

The rumor: Apple is delaying the release of its unannounced tablet from March until the second half of the year. It’ll offer a 9.7″ OLED-screen model for around $1200-$1500 and a 10.6″ LCD one for about $800-$100. Subsidies for 3G contracts could bring the prices down.